mist
by une boheme
Summary: this is an original character vignette--at least, I think it's a vignette--of the morning after the barricade. THIS IS FAITHFUL TO THE BOOK. no romance, no one comes back from the dead. please r/r!!!!!


Mist 

The day dawned cool and foggy. The mist swept in and hid last night's bodies and the carnage from view. A young man, somberly attired, approached the ruined cafe, carfully stepping around bodies, walking peculirarly to avoid losing his footing among all the blood. Taking a few deep breaths and swallowing hard, he steeled himself to glance down at the young martyrs on the ground all around him. There but for the grace of God....

"Yesterday, a fire started in your city," the young man said aloud. "A fire started by an ideal, fueled by conviction." His stride became more purposeful as he moved steadily toward the ravaged building. "Young men are dead upon an altar, young men who will likely not be long mourned. Some would say they disgraced themselfves, that they were traitors. Not so, citizens, not so." his voice was growing louder. A street-rat, robbing the dead, was so startled and put off by this odd young man, orating to no-one, that he ran off, abandoing ho-knew-how-much potential booty on the classic field of failed insurrection. 

The young man continued. "These young men were of the noblest breed. Well-educated, with good ideas and strong convictions. Men you see every day, mes amis, the boy you buy your bread from, the lodger across the way. Most of them were good students, gentle boys, who wouldn't hurt a fly. Their only fault was too much fervor. 

He had reached the door now, which was hanging off its hinges. He pulled it down with a vicious tug and stepped inside. More bodies. 

"They drank, and sang, enjoyed women, just like you. But they were willing to die for what they believed in. Think on this, my lords and ladies, you, woman from the factory, and you, man in the gutter. Think on this--What did these valorous boys believe in? They believed in justice. In 'each according to his need.' In the Republic--not, you who shudder and draw back, remembering the Terror--not the vindictive, plebian tyranny of the 1790's, but in an equal society where none starve, and the poor have dominion. I am not denying the implausibility of this ideal, you, fat contented progessor moaning at my fruitless story. My friends, there is nothing particularly good and noble about the poor. The poor are exactly the same as the rich, exactly the same as the so-despised bourgeoisie. The poor are not better than tyrant pigs--the only difference is that the poor have less. They are at a disadvantage--" 

The young man began to scramble up the destroyed staircase. He jumped, fell, go up, jumped again, and caught a crumbling rail. He pulled himself up onto a semi-solid portion before he could fall, and crawled on his hands and knees into the room which had been the last citadel of the Friends of the ABC. 

As the young man straightened, he looked around the room. His gaze rested on the two men opposite him. He allowed himself to see their faces and recognize their still, dead forms. He allowed himself to remember their names and to be saddened and sickened by the blood and the bullet-holes he could see on them. He allowed himself to think of Grantaire in that same pose, dead _drunk_ upon that same floor a week before, and of Enjolras in _that_ same pose, surveying his companions from against that same wall a week before. That proved to be one allowance too many for the young man, who shuddered and suddenly found his knees giving way. 

He sat on the floor and cried a little, softly. He felt the sudden urge to vomit and did so. Spitting and wiping his mouth, he tried to think--tried to put his thoughts back in order--and found he couldn't. He simply closed his eyes and remembered himself, the poor journalist, drowning his sorrows and one day finding himself in the back room. He managed to be unobtrusive enough to be ignored--and he came back the next day--and the next--but he didn't believe enough. He had no choice now but to let the images of the vital, excited, thoroughly _alive_ Friends of the ABC bombard his sick, melancholy brain until, once again, he could let thoughts and words flow from his lips. 

"They are at a disadvantage," he picked up where he'd left off, "and therefore they must be defended and died for by noble boys like these--" He breathed in shakily and crawled to the staircase, letting himself down the hole and landing in a craumpled heap at the bottom. 

He picked himself back up. "Defended and died for by noble boys like these. to keep the balance. When things get too far out of balance, not only _these_ boys, but possibly _all_ the idealist, impressionable boys in Paris die." 

He ran past the still forms of the old man and the boy on the table, shrouded in a flag. "But they didn't have to die. They could have lived long, helpful lives, if the people--" He was running out of breath. "If the people and the government supported their ideas of fundamental rights. 'Vive la Republique!' You may have heard it cried about your neighborhood. 'Vive la France!' and 'Vivent les peuples!' and 'Vive la libertŽ!" are what you should be hearing. 'Vive l'egalitŽ!'" 

The young man ran at full tilt, pushing his body to its very limit, but he stumbled and fell full-long across a corpse. Pushing himself up out of the blood, he glanced down at the face with its staring eyes and saw it to be Courfeyrac, Courfeyrac whom he had known better than the others, with whom he had even lodged at one point. Who had helped countless times with the editor's sullen demands for More Stories! Better Stories! Public Interest, You Diffident Fuck! 

And the young man fell back onto the cold body and wept all-out, his lungs convulsing with his sobs and his tears making the dried blood sticky. 

"You didn't have to die!" he cried. "It wasn't that important! You knew you would accomplish nothing. Your death meant _nothing_ to those who knew you! Things are not better! Lamarque is dead, and you are dead, and what is the use of that?! And you were _wrong!_ Liberty, yes! Equality, yes! But you had no clear plan! What is a proletariat ruler to me but another ruler? What is the point? You were wrong! Napoleon was an underpriveledged sot from Corsica, and Louis was a fat, extremely priveledged, thoroughly French bastard. What difference there? What difference between them and Javert, our local inspector? He was born in jail! It doesn't make him a better person! Besides, we need more than just a political change. The change we need is also social, and hell, _economic!_ Overthrowing the government will do jack shit to the price of bread! You only had to go to _class_ once in a while to know that! You were wrong! You didn't have to die! You were wrong! You didn't have to die!" 

His cries reverberated and scared ravens, rats, and robbers of some of the bodies in the alley. Let the madman rant, but go not close! 

"All you had to do was listen to me, just once! You didn't even have to ask--I was telling you all along. I said it, I did! You were just too busy and too idealistic and too blind and too deaf and too _stupid_ to listen! Two years isn't long enough to build an equal society--let alone the two _days_ your little emeutŽ lasted! Why could you not learn from the past? Why could you not learn from me, damn you! Damn you!" 

He did not know how long he stayed there, sobbing, but he finally quieted. "But what matters that to the price of tea in China?" he muttered. "You are dead, and there's an end. Vive la libertŽ!" He yelled bitterly to the bodies and the empty street and the mist. "Vive l'egalitŽ!" He picked himself up, and walked sedately home, and gave his bloodstained shirt to the laundress, and washed his face, and changed his clothes, and went out again, in another direction. 

Later that day, the product of the morning's sufferings, the story, given to the almighty editor and printed and distributed, the young man sipped his coffee in his flat and looked out at the morning's mist, now turned to rain. He drained his cup and set it on top of some papers on the table. He wandered out into the street until he found a cafŽ. 

_Drowning myself in absinthe,_ he thought, already under the spell of the green fairy. _Like Grantaire. What a fine role model for a young man like me. Perhaps one day I, too will find myself dead at the feet of my golden angel. In a cafŽ. And perhaps one day a young journalist will cry for me, as well. We are all the story. It all comes back to the story in the end._ He drained his glass. He did not return home until the next morning, fuzzily awakening to that specific sort of pain left only by much drink. 


End file.
